Colonel Mustardle in the Yardle with a Petardle
December 3, 2022 3:43 AM Subscribe
In the latest proof of new legal requirements that all internet puzzle games must now end in "rdle," distinguished readers, I give you Murdle, a daily homicide-based logic / elimination puzzle game. A bit of fun for when you still want to kill somebody some time after the crosswordle and the sudokurdle, but before watching Jeopardle.
(tagged Advent2022 because of this idea)
(tagged Advent2022 because of this idea)
Unfortunately only the internet puzzles ending in "-rdle" with a dark mode work as soporifics.
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 4:35 AM on December 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 4:35 AM on December 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
Also, some of the emoji choices are a bit suspect/ambiguous (a pot of honey for "an abstract statue"? A bag with a dollar sign versus a gun for "to inherit a fortune"/"to rob the victim"?). Including the emoji used in the notebook table in the text and answer selectors would go a long way towards getting started with the game more quickly.
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 4:57 AM on December 3, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 4:57 AM on December 3, 2022 [2 favorites]
(i don't understand the checks and x's in the notebook...?)
posted by mittens at 4:59 AM on December 3, 2022
posted by mittens at 4:59 AM on December 3, 2022
The notebook is a standard logic grid puzzle, like the ones you got in books of 100 before Sudoku cornered the market.
Also, I just clicked on the text under the cards and got the emoji-to-text translations, silly me. (I thought the 4 cards were going to be bonus clues enabling wordle-style scoring, I guess not)
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 5:07 AM on December 3, 2022 [2 favorites]
Also, I just clicked on the text under the cards and got the emoji-to-text translations, silly me. (I thought the 4 cards were going to be bonus clues enabling wordle-style scoring, I guess not)
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 5:07 AM on December 3, 2022 [2 favorites]
Yes, it would help to have the object, room, motive etc names against the grid.
posted by paduasoy at 5:11 AM on December 3, 2022
posted by paduasoy at 5:11 AM on December 3, 2022
Oooh, this is the exact intersection between my love of logic puzzles and Golden Age detective fiction! Thank you for posting it! Fun game, and it looks like they also have other content like "Minute Mysteries with Mrs. Fox."
I was playing on my phone where the notebook opens as a separate page -- a little too much back and forth, but on my laptop it's much easier as they are side-by-side panels.
Agree that words are better than emoji for the grid. I thought the sack of money was "rob the victim" at first.
posted by basalganglia at 5:24 AM on December 3, 2022 [2 favorites]
I was playing on my phone where the notebook opens as a separate page -- a little too much back and forth, but on my laptop it's much easier as they are side-by-side panels.
Agree that words are better than emoji for the grid. I thought the sack of money was "rob the victim" at first.
posted by basalganglia at 5:24 AM on December 3, 2022 [2 favorites]
It is too rainy to trudge to the farmers market, so I will be forced to have a cup of tea and solve a murder before the US-Netherlands knock out match. I will make do! Thanks for posting.
posted by the primroses were over at 5:49 AM on December 3, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by the primroses were over at 5:49 AM on December 3, 2022 [2 favorites]
Ten year old me probably could have solved this in their head if not for the emoji labels and the anagram. Fifty-something me used an online anagram solver and swore at the emoji labels and is trying to decide if she wants to spend a little while trying to kludge up some Javascript to expand the emoji labels into text.
posted by egypturnash at 6:48 AM on December 3, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by egypturnash at 6:48 AM on December 3, 2022 [4 favorites]
I’m not understanding at all how this is supposed to work. I can look at the cards, and click/tap on the grid and do the X-checkmark-? switch, but that’s all that seems to be available. Is the big bar above the “How to Play, Get a Hint, About” links supposed to do anything?
posted by Thorzdad at 6:54 AM on December 3, 2022
posted by Thorzdad at 6:54 AM on December 3, 2022
You can click on each card/icon and get more info about each person/item/room.
I had to start over twice because I kept confusing the colors. Once I realized you can reset the notebook, it got easier.
posted by soelo at 7:15 AM on December 3, 2022
I had to start over twice because I kept confusing the colors. Once I realized you can reset the notebook, it got easier.
posted by soelo at 7:15 AM on December 3, 2022
AH. Did not realize you could tap a second time for more info on suspects/weapons/etc. I was like, HOW CAN I TELL WHO HAS BLACK HAIR? 😭
posted by brook horse at 7:18 AM on December 3, 2022 [6 favorites]
posted by brook horse at 7:18 AM on December 3, 2022 [6 favorites]
Looks like Wordle has officially jumped the shardle.
posted by tommasz at 7:23 AM on December 3, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by tommasz at 7:23 AM on December 3, 2022 [4 favorites]
Oh boy, I needle murdle like I needle a hodel in my headle.
posted by not_on_display at 7:48 AM on December 3, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by not_on_display at 7:48 AM on December 3, 2022 [5 favorites]
Well, I assumed that as a mashup of Clue and Wordle it'd be a thing where you made successive guesses and used the results to come to a final conclusion. It is not. I guess I'll have to try again tomorrow.
posted by ckape at 7:56 AM on December 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by ckape at 7:56 AM on December 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
I was obsessed with these kinds of logic puzzles as a kid, I had a whole book of 'em. I am so very tempted to pre-order the book. I have so few non-screen things to do in the evening because everything other than reading sounds tedious or stressful to me but I could see myself spending an hour each evening obsessively filling out logic grids,
posted by brook horse at 8:09 AM on December 3, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by brook horse at 8:09 AM on December 3, 2022 [2 favorites]
MetaFirdle
posted by chavenet at 8:12 AM on December 3, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by chavenet at 8:12 AM on December 3, 2022 [3 favorites]
That was hard going for Saturday morning brain. Thanks, Inspector Irratino. Now that I know it doesn't keep track of the hints it gives you, I'm going all in on those immediately next time.
posted by geegollygosh at 8:25 AM on December 3, 2022
posted by geegollygosh at 8:25 AM on December 3, 2022
I love logic puzzles like this. This one took some learning to figure out how it worked (you can click the cards to see details about the object/person/location) but then it clicked. Definitely bookmarked to come back and play!
posted by msbutah at 8:47 AM on December 3, 2022
posted by msbutah at 8:47 AM on December 3, 2022
I'll take a logic grid over sudoku any day of the week. I've got fond memories of doing them in grade school. While I also found the initial set up a bit weird, and kept confusing two of the weapons in this case, I still thought it was very well done. Bookmarked and looking forward to tomorrow's puzzle!
posted by Janta at 9:19 AM on December 3, 2022
posted by Janta at 9:19 AM on December 3, 2022
I remember being absolutely boggled by this kind of puzzle back in the day, when they'd be part of mixed-bag puzzle magazines I'd get as a kid for trips and stuff. I'd never really been taught how you were supposed to make them work and so felt like it was just a weird impossible joke.
At some point in my 20s I think I gave 'em another shot for a bit, taking a more complete inferential skillset to the task and, I think vitally, actually reading some instructions on 'em. I remember it clicking and me being able to actually confidently solve the puzzles.
Now it's been years and years since I last did one and I can tell working through today's that I have forgotten some of that key plumbing for working through a solution. I've muddled a decent way into it, have a couple facts nailed down, but I can feel myself not remembering all of the tricks for translating one bit of new data to other parts of the grid systematically.
I still very much like logic puzzles in general, so it'd probably do me good to get back up to speed on this style. But I'm not sure my brain wants the extra homework right now.
posted by cortex at 3:58 PM on December 3, 2022
At some point in my 20s I think I gave 'em another shot for a bit, taking a more complete inferential skillset to the task and, I think vitally, actually reading some instructions on 'em. I remember it clicking and me being able to actually confidently solve the puzzles.
Now it's been years and years since I last did one and I can tell working through today's that I have forgotten some of that key plumbing for working through a solution. I've muddled a decent way into it, have a couple facts nailed down, but I can feel myself not remembering all of the tricks for translating one bit of new data to other parts of the grid systematically.
I still very much like logic puzzles in general, so it'd probably do me good to get back up to speed on this style. But I'm not sure my brain wants the extra homework right now.
posted by cortex at 3:58 PM on December 3, 2022
I'll take a logic grid over sudoku any day of the week.
It's an odd thing: I appreciate the texture of a word puzzle over the numeric blandness of Sudoku et al, but I find one of the very nice things about doing a Sudoku is there's a very simple constraint on how many different symbols I need to think about during a solution. Digits 1 through 9 and that's it? Great, frees up more of my brain to focus on the logic instead of parsing the symbols themselves or tracking novel names or objects or etc.
In fact, just revisiting Mass Effect Andromeda recently, I was reminded that there's a little Sudoku minigame for hacking alien technology yadda yadda. And on the one hand I like Sudoku a lot more these days than I did when it first came out so this was initially a little thrill; but on the other hand the game uses some made up glyphs from an alien language instead of numbers, and as a result it's a deeply unfun experience to solve an otherwise trivial little puzzle because I have to carefully review every row and column, each time, to painstakingly track which of those alien glyphs is actually in the row already. The extra cognitive load introduced by moving away from simple symbols rarely adds any fun to the process for me. With wordly logic puzzles like these you're gonna have descriptive labels anyway, which is fine, but the notes folks have had about having to parse colors and emoji gets at some of the same cognitive load issues.
But vanilla Sudoku does run out of charm after a while; I think the reason I've stayed interested in it is not the original puzzle format itself but interesting variants and one-off puzzles of the sort that get regularly featured on the Cracking the Cryptic channel. I almost never find myself doing vanilla Sudoku anymore because once I got to the point of being able to work reasonably advanced ones, there was nothing new happening and the only place to go upward in difficulty was puzzles requiring very tedious scanning and multi-step inferences. Whereas the variants that CtC presents always have some new additional bit of logic to ferret out, some daily "a ha!" moment to feel excited about puzzling out instead of just doing another rote execution of looking for X-Wings and Naked Singles and so on for the nth time.
posted by cortex at 4:10 PM on December 3, 2022
It's an odd thing: I appreciate the texture of a word puzzle over the numeric blandness of Sudoku et al, but I find one of the very nice things about doing a Sudoku is there's a very simple constraint on how many different symbols I need to think about during a solution. Digits 1 through 9 and that's it? Great, frees up more of my brain to focus on the logic instead of parsing the symbols themselves or tracking novel names or objects or etc.
In fact, just revisiting Mass Effect Andromeda recently, I was reminded that there's a little Sudoku minigame for hacking alien technology yadda yadda. And on the one hand I like Sudoku a lot more these days than I did when it first came out so this was initially a little thrill; but on the other hand the game uses some made up glyphs from an alien language instead of numbers, and as a result it's a deeply unfun experience to solve an otherwise trivial little puzzle because I have to carefully review every row and column, each time, to painstakingly track which of those alien glyphs is actually in the row already. The extra cognitive load introduced by moving away from simple symbols rarely adds any fun to the process for me. With wordly logic puzzles like these you're gonna have descriptive labels anyway, which is fine, but the notes folks have had about having to parse colors and emoji gets at some of the same cognitive load issues.
But vanilla Sudoku does run out of charm after a while; I think the reason I've stayed interested in it is not the original puzzle format itself but interesting variants and one-off puzzles of the sort that get regularly featured on the Cracking the Cryptic channel. I almost never find myself doing vanilla Sudoku anymore because once I got to the point of being able to work reasonably advanced ones, there was nothing new happening and the only place to go upward in difficulty was puzzles requiring very tedious scanning and multi-step inferences. Whereas the variants that CtC presents always have some new additional bit of logic to ferret out, some daily "a ha!" moment to feel excited about puzzling out instead of just doing another rote execution of looking for X-Wings and Naked Singles and so on for the nth time.
posted by cortex at 4:10 PM on December 3, 2022
With wordly logic puzzles like these you're gonna have descriptive labels anyway, which is fine, but the notes folks have had about having to parse colors and emoji gets at some of the same cognitive load issues.
There's a fascinating study to be done here about individual differences in verbal vs numeric reasoning and perhaps visual thinking. I abhor Sudoku but I also process numbers much slower than your average person. But my verbal skills are excellent, and I apparently have a much better short-term memory than most because when asked to repeat a list of objects I picture the objects rather than repeating the list to myself. So this fit in exactly with how I think, while Sudoku is an agonizing struggle, not because it's any harder but because it's a greater cognitive load for me than words/images.
In fact, I just pulled out my old neuropsych testing, and there are two processing speed subtests--one involves scanning a row of abstract symbols for a specific symbol, the other involves matching symbols to numbers and writing the correct symbol for the number. I did significantly worse on the one that involved numbers. I bet you I'd do better on your Mass Effect mini game than Sudoku. Which makes no sense because numbers should just be symbols, right? Except they're not and it's weird. So weird! :D
posted by brook horse at 6:14 PM on December 3, 2022
There's a fascinating study to be done here about individual differences in verbal vs numeric reasoning and perhaps visual thinking. I abhor Sudoku but I also process numbers much slower than your average person. But my verbal skills are excellent, and I apparently have a much better short-term memory than most because when asked to repeat a list of objects I picture the objects rather than repeating the list to myself. So this fit in exactly with how I think, while Sudoku is an agonizing struggle, not because it's any harder but because it's a greater cognitive load for me than words/images.
In fact, I just pulled out my old neuropsych testing, and there are two processing speed subtests--one involves scanning a row of abstract symbols for a specific symbol, the other involves matching symbols to numbers and writing the correct symbol for the number. I did significantly worse on the one that involved numbers. I bet you I'd do better on your Mass Effect mini game than Sudoku. Which makes no sense because numbers should just be symbols, right? Except they're not and it's weird. So weird! :D
posted by brook horse at 6:14 PM on December 3, 2022
I love this! Finally one of these -urdle games that doesnt make me angry!
posted by silverstatue at 8:30 PM on December 3, 2022
posted by silverstatue at 8:30 PM on December 3, 2022
So, it's like Sherlock for Gen Z? I spent many a rainy afternoon in the previous millennium enjoying this logic puzzle.
posted by gakiko at 1:21 AM on December 4, 2022
posted by gakiko at 1:21 AM on December 4, 2022
I did manage to solve today's! At least I'm no longer sending the wrong person to prison!
posted by mittens at 4:55 AM on December 4, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by mittens at 4:55 AM on December 4, 2022 [1 favorite]
Today's was much easier and seemed to have several redundant clues.
posted by soelo at 8:53 AM on December 4, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by soelo at 8:53 AM on December 4, 2022 [1 favorite]
I solved today's 2 minutes faster, which was probably partially because I wasn't watching a Columbo episode at the same time...
posted by brook horse at 10:01 AM on December 4, 2022
posted by brook horse at 10:01 AM on December 4, 2022
Yeah, I'm wondering if they do like a New York Times crossword puzzle difficulty curve. Maybe Monday is really easy and they ratchet up the difficulty as the week progresses?
posted by JDHarper at 12:43 PM on December 5, 2022
posted by JDHarper at 12:43 PM on December 5, 2022
I am snorting at today's Caesar cipher message with offset 0.
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 3:34 AM on December 6, 2022 [7 favorites]
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 3:34 AM on December 6, 2022 [7 favorites]
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posted by paduasoy at 4:27 AM on December 3, 2022